In the 12th century, 'Plantagenet' was no more than a nickname given to Henry II's father Geoffrey le Bel, Count of Anjou, arbitrarily believed to have been derived from 'Planista  genista' a sprig of which Geoffrey is said to have frequently worn in his cap. It has been adopted to mark one of the most powerful dynasties in the Medieval world.

To capture the essence of the history over a 250 year period is a tricky thing none more so than when looking at the Plantagenet period. So let us first take a brief look at the place that Britain was in the first few hundred years of the new millenium. How would the common people have fared?

The English Environment in the Plantagenet period

We are known to be a people preoccupied by the weather but with good reason. Life was tough for people in this period. The majority of people lived in very poor dwellings, exposed to whatever the weather threw at them. The weather determined how they lived, the cold and wet, the hot and dry affected the harvests which were never going to be brilliant anyway. They lived wet and cold in the winters facing terrible diseases and scant food. It was enough to simply survive. Weather mattered to the people of the British Isles. The variable nature of the seasons weather dictated what and when they could do things, when weather determines possible survival no wonder it became an obsession to the people of Britain.

The land, when it chose to, could be bountiful and this period saw the development of new towns and markets where, if there was an abundance of produce, it could be sold.

Climate change in the C13th /C14th

The obsession with the weather meant that it was often recorded by the chroniclers or courts and such accounts tell us that the early C14th century saw a marked decline in the weather. The previous decades seem to have been blessed with more moderate weather but following the great storm of 1298 which brought flooding to many parts and destroyed the harvest, the climate set itself to a colder and wetter setting bringing misery to the people of these isles.

The weather had an impact on economics, politics and war.

No less than for the people, the weather had a very obvious impact on the economy. Poor harvests meant higher grain prices and therefore bread prices. Bread was the staple of the British diet and so not unexpectedly we see popular resentment directed at the government as happened in 1258. Where poor harvests collided with huge expenditure on war then political crisis followed. It was a period of intense turmoil for the common people and King Johns reign from 1199 - 1216 was to prove calamitous, at its end civil war raged and although many sought to blame John for all the problems there is no doubt the country was suffering on many fronts but that is to get into too much detail. Let us first take a whizz around the Plantagenet monarchs as a guide to help us unravel this complex period

The Plantagenet Monarchs.

The Plantagenet Kings and their family tree is a tangled web, raising many questions the over centuries and has quite recently raised its head in the courts of England in the citations for the finding of a Monarch Richard of III of York, hundreds of years after his death to prove his lineage via DNA. So just who were they and why was this dynasty to prove to be quite so enduring in our modern minds?